Jianglin Li's Tibet in Agony chronicles in some detail the Tibetan uprising of 1959 and focuses in particular on the factors that prompted the fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso (1935–), to flee into exile in India following a mass insurrection centered in Lhasa in March of that year. Most of this history has already been described and analyzed by previous scholars, and aside from minor details gleaned from interviews and previously unexamined documents, there is little that will be new for specialists in modern Tibetan history.
In the preface to this English edition, Li describes herself as “a Han Chinese from mainland China, daughter of two lifetime Communist Party members,” who “grew up with the Party line that Tibet is a legitimate part of China and that the Dalai Lama is a ‘wolf in sheep's clothing’—a treasonous ‘splittist’” (p. vii). She came to question these beliefs during graduate study in...
